Tribalism Is Still Dynamite In Many Parts Of The World

PARIS — People like to think that ideology is what makes trouble in the world, but the most trouble is made by tribalism. Tribalism is the force which tells humans who they are, and who they are not. Telling them who they are not is the part which has proven the most explosive.

Tribalism--in which I include nationalism, racial feeling, religious communalism--affronts the liberal conscience. There is a large and high-minded apparatus for denying its force or ameliorating its consequences, from the United Nations to the affirmative action program. No doubt they do some good. Tribalism nonetheless remains dynamite. The Waldheim affair, for example, has become a tribal matter. The war-crimes accusations made against Austrian President Kurt Waldheim by the World Jewish Congress and his effective exclusion from the United States by Justice Department decision have provoked a powerful nationalist reaction in Austria on the part of many who are neither anti-Semitic nor admirers of the equivocal Waldheim.

An official of the Socialist Party, which governs the country in coalition with Conservatives, said at the end of May that Waldheim`s resignation has become a possibility under these pressures, but that in current circumstances this ``would be bad because it would create a new `stab in the back` legend.`` This, one thinks, is not what foreign pressure was meant to produce.

Yet in modern Austria only bitterness and anger are risked, not war, persecution, murder and riot, as was the case 50 years ago. That was when the Anschluss, Austria`s unification with Nazi Germany, took place to much popular enthusiasm, and state persecution of Austria`s Jews began.

Elsewhere in the contemporary world, people are less fortunate. Tribalism is producing murder, war or bloody repression in Sri Lanka, India`s Punjab, the India-China border, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Iran, and a dozen places in Africa. Hindus, Tamils, Sikhs, Moslems of different traditions, Catholics, Protestants, blacks and whites, blacks and blacks, whites and whites, all kill one another with gleams in their eyes and in the joyful conviction that they and theirs are right, and that those they kill deserve to die as painfully as possible.

One must add, in this respect, that within the lifetimes of those members of the American tribe who are over 30, ``uppity`` black Americans still risked intimidation, murder or mutilation by American whites, and in the North as well as South institutions of racial segregation and subordination were maintained to general white approbation or acquiescence.

Within the lifetimes of any American over 50, anti-Semitism was an American institution, with written or tacit racial covenants governing the use of property, admission to many careers and to the ``best`` universities and the governing institutions of society. America`s donning of virtue`s mantle in racial matters, authorizing it to pass judgment upon Austrians, South Africans and others, was fairly recent--and possibly less securely accomplished than many think.

The power of tribalism derives from the primordial assurance it offers to people of who they are. This function takes place today in circumstances where larger and larger numbers of people are cut off from what they are--from constructive relationship to place, community and belief--and therefore directed toward destructive but compensatory relationships of hatred and fear. A signal aspect of a civilization of global communications, international mobility of labor and capital, the internationalization of economies, and the global propagation of a (usually) degraded and degrading simulacrum of Western popular culture is that men and women are uprooted from what they are or have been.

Violence in Sri Lanka, India, Northern Ireland, South Africa, New Caledonia--even the coup d`etat in Fiji that took place last month--are tribal conflicts artificially intensified by the fact that those primarily involved are populations deliberately displaced under colonial authority. Tamils were moved into what then was Ceylon and Indians sent to Fiji as laborers.

Religious persecution sent Dutch Calvinists to South Africa, and religious conflict lay behind Britain`s installation of Scotch Presbyterians in Ulster. Economic as well as colonial influences made New Caledonia and Fiji --and Australia, New Zealand and, for that matter, Canada and the United States--into places where the native population became beleaguered minorities. Racial tension in Western Europe`s big cities is the consequence of immigration by formerly colonial populations, as well as the unconsidered recruitment of non-European laborers to West European industry during the 1950s and `60s. These minorities, too, often remain inadequately assimilated, undigested, poor, angry--and feared and resented by the majorities.

We tamper all too casually with tribalism. We all too recklessly gamble with the consequences of detribalization. These are among the most powerful forces at work in contemporary political society. They are a permanent threat to the fragile political accommodations that allow a privileged minority of us, today, to live in relative peace with one another, and which limit, however inadequately, the violence of international life.